Episode 2.95 - Bracken Croziers and Brambling Flocks

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On a breezy but still mild late-October morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin walk into Cantley Hill Plantation and finally give proper attention to a plant Chris has overlooked for years despite its lifelong link with him — bracken. Covering about five acres on the farm and still shoulder-high and green after the drought on a south-facing gravel slope, the fronds rise from long underground rhizomes that allow it to recover almost overnight, as it did within a fortnight of the Dunwich Heath fire. Chris explains the tripinnate leaf structure, the curled spring croziers once eaten like asparagus (and still popular in Japan), and the plant’s double reputation: toxic enough to cause staggers in cattle and horses and linked to cancers, yet invaluable cover for slow worms, grass snakes, field voles and wintering woodcock whose plumage mirrors its golden-brown litter. Its spread, he notes, was helped by Neolithic forest clearance and later by the shift from cattle and horses to sheep.

Barely leaving the truck, they are then treated to a mixed flock of finches on the overwinter wild-bird seed mix. Yellowhammers, greenfinches, linnets and the first brambling of the year are feeding on fat hen and sunflowers only yards away, until a kestrel or the wave of a hand flushes the whole charm into the oak avenue. Chris celebrates the stewardship-funded plots that are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

In an evening recording from the duck pond, the resident moorhens are in open war with their own offspring. The two successful broods have left seven birds on a pond that can only support one pair through winter; the parents are now aggressively driving the young away to prevent overcrowding and inbreeding. Chris reflects on the strange light-triggered timing around the shortest day that sets so many birds’ internal clocks, and on the parallel dispersal of young foxes from their natal territories.

Listener letters bring a luminous photograph of a pale tussock caterpillar, a query about leeches in a dried Italian pond (prompting a history of the medicinal leech), and strong agreement that snares should long ago have been banned.

This episode is an autumn lesson in overlooked plants, mixed flocks and the sometimes harsh necessities of family life — ideal for savouring the resilience of bracken, the colour of a brambling, and the noisy drama of moorhens sorting their winter numbers at High Ash Farm.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/20007759-episode-2-95-bracken-croziers-and-brambling-flocks.mp3?download=true

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